ICANN responds to comments from first draft guidebook.
[I’m on a plane to New Orleans so have had little time to review ICANN’s many documents released today. But here’s a summary.] After receiving hundreds of comments, mostly requesting major changes or clarifications to the original draft of the new TLD handbook, ICANN has made a good effort to acknowledge the comments. It released a 154 page analysis of the comments received and its response to them. Among them:
Intellectual Property: ICANN proposes setting up a number of meetings and working with IP organizations to figure out if there’s a way to avoid trademark holders having to make thousands of defensive registrations.
Demand: ICANN will release a study about the demand for new TLDs soon.
Registrar/Registry separation: Registries that are affiliated with a registrar (i.e. similar ownership) cannot treat the registrar any different, and the registrar may be limited to the number of registrations of that registry’s domain names.
Annual registry fees: reduced to $25,000 per year for smaller registries
Auction proceeds: any proceeds from auctioning off TLDs would be put into a fund with specific purposes, such as managing registry failures and outreach campaigns.
Timeline: It is unlikely applications will be accepted until at least December 2009.
Registry pricing: Some sort of mechanism to keep registries from jacking up prices without justification.
M. Menius says
“Registry pricing: Some sort of mechanism to keep registries from jacking up prices without justification.”
Could you identify which part of the report addresses the above? Thanks.
Johnny says
Huh?
I have not read it myself yet, but George Kirkos said over at Circle ID that there is no provisions for stopping a price increase.
Kieren McCarthy says
If anyone would like to ask a specific question about the guidebook during the upcoming meeting in Mexico – especially during the 90-minute Q&A session on Monday 2 March at 11am, then there is a simple online Question Box where you can do precisely that.
Thanks
Kieren McCarthy
General manager of public participation, ICANN
Andrew Allemann says
@ Johnny – I think I misread ICANN’s section about this, as I interpreted its summary of feedback received as an action it was actually going to consider:
“ICANN should clarify whether price controls that apply to domain
names will be preserved; before any elimination of them ICANN must demonstrate the
mechanisms to ensure that prices will be controlled by market forces”
So we need to keep pushing for this.
On the positive side, there’s a clause that “Reasonable notice should be provided before any pricing changes are made on domain
renewals.”
Andrew Allemann says
@ Johnny – OK, found what I was looking for. ICANN is considering price caps:
https://domainnamewire.com/2009/02/25/icann-to-study-price-caps-on-domain-registrations/